Smart Building Trends that Can Transform our Cities

Smart buildings are one of the defining pieces of London’s urban development in our age. Augmented by emerging IoT technologies, smart buildings offer unprecedented opportunities to improve operating efficiency and productivity.

But the “I” in IoT is the gateway to a far more impressive world, and the biggest players in the smart buildings market have already caught a glimpse of it. The mesh of interconnected buildings, campuses, urban facilities and homes is slowly morphing into the shape of a smart city: a greener, friendlier, more productive city, in whose fashioning you and your business can play an active role.

How smart buildings are transforming our cities, and what you can do to be at the forefront of this wave of transformation, is what we are going to talk about today.

Two CCTV housings on an arm fixed to a pole against a pale sky

Smart Buildings and Transportation

London is one of the busiest business hubs in the world. London’s transport network serves a large and varied commuting population, while road traffic and parking demand create operational pressures around many workplaces. Current travel patterns should be assessed using dated DfT, TfL or ONS data rather than the unsupported 70% car-or-bus figure previously stated here.

Office buildings are hotspots of transportation-related activity, so it comes as no surprise that this is where many opportunities to improve our daily life arise.

Parking efficiency is the area with the most visible improvement, and the technology behind it has crept in without much fuss during the last few years. Parking access automation and parking guidance can significantly reduce waiting times, cluttering and small-scale traffic.

Parking access automation refers to automating access control, logging and management processes in office parking areas. This is achieved primarily by leveraging data from high-resolution CCTV cameras. Using technologies such as automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, access control software can quickly permit or deny access to vehicles, log their arrival and departure time, and construct parking space usage statistics in real time.

If you’re looking to install a CCTV system endowed with automatic number plate recognition and more features that can turn your London building into a smart one, take a look at our dedicated service.

Occupancy data, aggregated from multiple parking locations, can be used for parking guidance and quickly guiding drivers towards nearby parking spaces. This is particularly useful for companies that have multiple parking areas, around multiple buildings or on busy streets with small parking areas.

Energy Management

According to a building energy efficiency survey conducted by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, offices, retail and industrial buildings were the top non-domestic energy consumers in the UK, most of it in the form of electricity. Internal lighting accounted for more than half of the electricity use, and was the second largest end-use of energy, trailing significantly behind space heating.

Both internal lighting and space heating (which, together, account for nearly half of the total energy consumed by non-domestic buildings in the UK) are highly susceptible to waste and mismanagement.

Using smart lighting and HVAC installations, advanced building energy management systems can meaningfully reduce energy use, with the scale of savings depending on the building type, baseline, measures installed and commissioning quality.

These installations save money primarily by turning off or reducing lighting and HVAC parameters, depending on occupancy, time of day, ambient conditions and usage statistics. Modern smart lighting systems are not simply on-off switches hooked to presence sensors; their functioning takes into account ambient lighting conditions and usage statistics as well.

Not only do these systems reduce operating costs, but they contribute to reducing each building’s carbon footprint, and improve the efficiency and lifetime of the city’s electrical networks. They also improve the efficiency of many modern business practices, such as remote working.

Integrated Security Systems

Modern smart building deployments treat security systems as an essential asset for data and staff protection, a useful source of access data and an opportunity to improve daily operations. This trend initially took the form of what we now call IT-integrated security, where the security infrastructure was digitised and integrated with the rest of a company’s IT infrastructure to accommodate its traffic demands and facilitate management. But additional opportunities were identified, and smart building designers were quick to capitalise on them. Security endpoints, such as security cameras and motion detectors, can be integrated with access control modules and serve as sources of valuable data regarding access events and patterns.

This trend has also opened the way for a more inclusive approach to security, allowing for the easier and safer expansion of business premises, especially for multi-site operations partially housed outside traditional business areas.

Hands around a tablet projecting a glowing city with Wi-Fi and network icons

Smart Buildings and Smart Cities

Why the focus on smart buildings? Their advantages are compelling, but are they compelling enough to warrant looking into technologies that are non-trivial to integrate, and raise new challenges in terms of deployment and security?

The answer lies in sustainability. Smart buildings, and the smart cities that they enable, grant not only occasional opportunities for more efficient operation but a sustainable, steady improvement of our working and living experience.

Integrating smart building technologies into your office, and participating in the smart city enablement of your city, will not only earn you a reduced energy bill or a better parking experience today. It will also allow you to capitalise on the reduced carbon footprint of your office, the improved security and convenience of your parking spaces, and the reduced fuel consumption of your car.

Being at the forefront of this shift is not only a head start in terms of early benefits but also a foundation for solid development in the long run.

Integrated Security Systems

Enabling the Smart Building Transformation

Smart building technologies have a great deal of potential, but leveraging them in a sustainable manner, over long periods of time, in interconnected systems seems like a daunting responsibility. When set against timeframes typical for facility development, which routinely deals in decades rather than years, many of these technologies are intimidatingly new.

We are still discovering many of the challenges that they introduce. For solutions, we depend more on engineering creativity than on well-known practices.

The main challenges that smart buildings introduce are:

Scaling bandwidth and latency over a wide set of networking technologies and long periods of time
Deploying high-speed, private network infrastructure in new ambient conditions
Securely interconnecting equipment deployed over long distances

Infrastructure scaling is the most far-reaching of these challenges. Even with the increased use of wireless endpoints, wired networks still form the backbone and carry the bulk of the endpoint traffic in modern office buildings.

The wired infrastructure, then, is where most of the scaling effort will be focused. However, cabling is the longest-lived section of a company network.

The norm today is in the region of 15-20 years, and these numbers are expected to go up. Four or five generations of endpoint equipment, if not more, are routinely outlasted by the cabling which enables that equipment to communicate.

With more than 20 years of experience in offering cabling solutions to London commercial buildings, ACCL is at the forefront of innovation in this field. Take a look at our data cabling services and get in touch for your FREE, no-obligations on-site survey.

Structured cabling can provide a documented, interoperable foundation that helps smart-building systems scale and change over time. It is one part of the wider design alongside fibre, wireless, fieldbus, single-pair Ethernet and other operational-technology networks selected for the project. Structured cabling breaks down the network infrastructure into function-specific sections.

Each section has a specific role, such as providing connectivity to user devices or smart sensors, or securely connecting the building’s core network to the ISP’s network.

Each section is designed according to a set of industry-sanctioned best practices. These practices are not arbitrary, but based on the experience and expectation of network engineers, device manufacturers, facility managers, and health and safety experts. They are also designed specifically in order to facilitate scaling, both horizontally and vertically.

Scaling structured cabling networks is a concerted effort focused more on network sections than individual endpoints. Fortunately, smart buildings offer a wealth of data that can be leveraged in order to plan the long-term development of your network.

The kind of data that you can use includes:

Traffic statistics for each section of the network, broken down by origin (user equipment, sensors, HVAC equipment, etc.) and ingress/egress routes (wireless endpoints, office switches, etc.)
Usage statistics, broken down by application
Cross-network traffic statistics (i.e. how much traffic needs to be routed internally through the core network)

Diverse deployment conditions are another challenge that smart buildings bring or, more accurately, make even more acute. Network cabling, like any electrical equipment, needs to be shielded from moisture, extreme temperatures, dust and other unwanted ambient conditions. Office buildings are friendly environments for electrical equipment. Traditionally, only a few types of IP-enabled gear, such as some security cameras, needed to be deployed under adverse conditions.

A CCTV camera with a red light, seen from the side at night

In smart buildings, this is no longer true.

Network cabling has to reach security cameras, sensors, solar panels or lighting equipment placed outside the main buildings, exposed to ambient temperature, sun and rain. Some of this equipment itself may have special cabling requirements, such as redundant power and data cables.

In practice, this has two main consequences:

Cables with special additional shielding may need to be used to offer better immunity against electrical interference
Special sheathing or enclosures may be used to protect the cables against ambient conditions and tampering

Long-distance cabling is a special case of this situation. Cables used for office networks (i.e. Cat5/6 cables, the ones that we usually call “Ethernet cables“) are designed to work over distances and under ambient conditions typical for an office building. That is, distances of no more than 80 to 100 metres, with relatively little electrical interference. Equipment used for smart buildings, especially those on large campuses, sometimes needs to be deployed at a great distance from the main building: hundreds of metres, sometimes more. The traffic requirements are not trivial either; high-resolution CCTV cameras used for security systems may need speeds in the Mbps region. This speed, over this sort of distance, is where fibre optic cable starts being considered for deployment. Fibre optic cables are more expensive to purchase and install, but can carry signals over hundreds or thousands of meters, at high speeds.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Smart buildings are only the first step towards smart cities. From London and Amsterdam to New York and Sydney, we are living the earliest days of a major shift in how we live and work in our cities. Smart building technologies, interconnected across buildings and campuses, offer unique development opportunities that benefit society as a whole as well as your own business, 24/7 rather than only during work hours. Being at the forefront of this transformation gives you a head start in capitalising on the early opportunities (useful, but not essential, because this is not a zero-sum game) and a solid foundation for long-term development. Integrating smart building solutions into your business’s infrastructure is challenging, but not out of reach, even for small businesses. A solid integration strategy, based on structured cabling, tight integration, and metric-based audit and development, can position your business at the forefront of this urban revolution.

Services related to this post: Smart building integration services

Key Takeaways

Integration of IoT, AI, and automation is driving smarter building management, enabling real-time connectivity, predictive maintenance, and centralised system control for greater efficiency.
ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) factors and sustainability are now central to smart building design, supporting energy reduction, transparent reporting, and future-proof operation.
Key technologies include AI-powered security, occupancy sensors for flexible workspaces, and digital twins for continuous simulation and optimisation of building performance.
Enhanced occupant wellbeing, contactless systems for health and safety, and dynamic resource management are vital trends shaping workplaces and commercial spaces in 2025.

Frequently Asked Questions: Smart Building Trends

Q. What are the main smart building trends?

The biggest trends are connected energy management, integrated security that links CCTV and access control, occupancy sensing to use space better, and links between buildings and the wider city such as transport and parking. All of them depend on reliable connectivity, so the network inside the building becomes as important as heating or power.

Q. Why does connectivity matter so much in a smart building?

Every sensor, camera, controller and access point needs a reliable connection to work, and many need power too. If the network is patchy or overloaded, building systems stop reporting or react late. Planning cabling, Wi-Fi and power over Ethernet together gives the building one dependable foundation instead of separate systems competing for capacity.

Q. Which communication technology should I choose for a smart building?

Most smart buildings use a mix. Structured cabling with power over Ethernet carries cameras, access points, controllers and sensors that need reliability. Wi-Fi covers mobile devices. Low-power wireless protocols suit battery sensors. The right mix depends on how critical each system is, so start with a survey and a list of the devices you plan to connect.

Q. What is a smart building management system?

It is the software that brings heating, ventilation, lighting, energy metering, security and occupancy data together in one place. It can automate routine decisions, such as reducing heating in empty areas, and alert facilities teams to faults. It relies on the building network to collect data from every connected system.

Q. What cabling does a smart building need?

Most smart buildings use a fibre backbone between floors and buildings, with Cat6a copper out to each device. Cat6a carries higher power over Ethernet and the speeds current Wi-Fi needs, so cameras, access points, lighting controls and sensors run on one documented system. Leave room in containment and cabinets for the devices you will add later.

Q. Can a smart building use existing wiring?

Partly. Existing data cabling can often be reused if it tests to the right category, and some systems can run over existing coaxial or telephone wiring with adapters. Older cabling usually limits speed and power over Ethernet, though, so a survey and test should decide what is kept and what is replaced.

Q. How do you plan indoor connectivity for a smart building?

List every system that needs a connection, then design the cabling, Wi-Fi and power around them together. A Wi-Fi survey sets access point positions, the cabling design sets outlet and cabinet locations, and the switch design sets power over Ethernet budgets. Leave spare capacity so new systems can be added later without rewiring.

For practical rollout considerations, see our guide to AI in the office for IT and facilities teams.

Written by Wayne Connors, Founder & Managing Director, ACCL

Written by

Wayne Connors

Founder & Managing Director, ACCL

Wayne founded ACCL in 1997 and has led more than 28 years of project delivery, helping organisations design, install and modernise the network infrastructure behind reliable connectivity, office moves and refurbishments. His experience spans copper cabling, fibre backbones, data centre infrastructure, Wi-Fi, CCTV and access control. About ACCL